


Together We Make a Family

by Peggy_Cherepaha



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Parental!Bucky, Roadtrip, tw for canon-typical abuse, tw for canon-typical violence, tw for implied drug use, tw for implied pedophilia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-25 00:41:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19734904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Peggy_Cherepaha/pseuds/Peggy_Cherepaha
Summary: After killing Howard Stark, the Winter Soldier breaks programming and kidnaps Tony Stark. What follows is a roadtrip where they pick up some more stragglers along the way and maybe form some semblance of a family.





	Together We Make a Family

1991

“Sergeant Barnes?” The mission asked. That was not protocol, the mission was supposed to die, the mission was not supposed to say that name.

_“Sergeant Barnes! I’ve heard a lot about you from the good Captain.”_

_“You spilling my secrets, Rogers?”_

The soldier looked at the passenger. Female, middle aged, deceased on impact.

The mission was still talking. “What’s happening? How did you get here?”

More questions. The soldier doesn’t answer questions. The soldier doesn’t ask questions either.

“What’s in the trunk?” Asking a question is permissible if necessary to the mission. Confirming the contents of the trunk is necessary to the mission.

_“Come on in! Let’s talk weapons. Anything you want, I can get it. And when I say weapons, I mean a gun, not the big metal frisbee someone likes to throw around.”_

_“Hey, you made it! Anyways, it works, doesn’t it?”_

“The super soldier serum. Is that what you want? Who are you with? Who are you?”

_“Barnes, James Buchanan. Sergeant. 32557038.”_

“What did they do to you?”

_“It’s me, Buck.”_

The soldier didn’t have time for this. Kill the witness, retrieve the briefcase, return to base, mission report, chair, wipe him, start over.

_Start over._

“Why would you do this, Stark?” The soldier asked. “They’re going to make more. Why would you help them make more!”

Stark was dead. Blunt force trauma, excessive bleeding.

The soldier took the briefcase out of the trunk and strapped it to his bike. He rode in the direction the car had come from. He was going to destroy every last drop of that poison.

***

Tony had been in many strange situations in his life. Something about him just made him a magnet for weirdos. Well, it was probably the fact that he was a child genius and heir to Stark Industries. He was used to being stalked by journalists and obsessed fans, and he got into all kinds of trouble when he got drunk. But even the craziest of fans didn’t put him off like the stranger currently giving him a deranged look from across the sitting room.

The man was huge, both tall and completely buff. He was wearing a black leather jacket will all kinds of straps and buckles. The strangest part was it looked like his left arm was made of metal.

“Hey man, can I help you?”

“Where’s the lab?” Crazy dude said right away.

“Listen, how about I get you some autographed pictures and we can just-“ In an instant the guy had crossed the room and thrown Tony onto the floor, pinning his arm behind his back.

“There’s no time for this!” The guy was yelling, and steadily applying pressure to his arm. “Show me where Stark keeps his experiments right now! They’re coming!”

This was not the normal kind of obsessed stalker, this was an actually dangerous person after his dad’s work. In this kind of situation, Tony was supposed to stall for time until he could reach one of the panic buttons in the house. The self-defense instructor that gave Tony this advice had obviously never had a giant psycho with a metal arm on his back.

“In the basement, I’ll show you. You can have whatever you want.”

The guy pulled Tony up with that metal hand on his arm and gave him a shove. Tony quickly led the guy to the basement door and hoped he would make it out of this alive.

The man ended up dragging Tony around with him as he collected all of the papers and bags of mysterious fluids in the lab, meaning Tony was never close enough to any of the panic buttons. The man also pulled some bags of blue fluid out of his pockets. They had the Stark Industries emblem on them but he had no idea what any of the stuff was.

The man paused to stare at a newspaper clipping on the wall over his dad’s desk. It was a front page story of Tony graduating MIT, and how he planned to work for Stark Industries. Tony was surprised to feel tears rolling down his cheeks. Here he was, kidnapped by a man with a metal arm and all he could think of was that he was going to die without having told his dad he loved him. For all the awful things his father had said to him, he kept a newspaper clip of Tony right above his desk.

Tony was pulled from his thoughts when the man looked at him. “You’re Stark’s kid?” He asked, and Tony just nodded.

He sat Tony down in the center of the room and crouched down next to him. He held the metal arm out and the large panel on the shoulder opened.

“I need you to take out the tracker,” the man said and Tony just stared at the arm, trying to process what was happening.

“The tracker! You need to take it out before they get here!”

Tony felt like he was going into shock, because instead of bolting for the door, he leaned his head in closer to look into the mess of wires and metal bars that were inside the prosthetic arm.

“Well, I’ll need my tools, and a flashlight, and an idea of what it looks like would help,” Tony said and the man leapt up and grabbed a handful of tools that were scattered around one of the workbenches. He sat down in front of Tony and dropped the tools on the ground. The man then picked up a large pair of pliers and, before Tony knew what was happening, put the pliers in his mouth and yanked out one of his molars.

The man didn’t make any noise when he pulled the tooth out, even as blood gushed out of his mouth. He held the tooth out for Tony to see and he saw that the tooth was fake, and instead was a housing for a tiny circuit board and casing that Tony assumed was a tracking device.

“Oh, ok, um, are you ok?” Tony asked, but the man just stared back at him with a blank expression. Tony was pretty sure the guy was high on something.

“Well, only way out is through,” Tony said out loud and picked up a flashlight from the ground. He was able to find an identical tracker in the metal arm right away and spent a minute fiddling with the wires to figure out how to disconnect it. He got to work carefully cutting the tracker out and found himself talking to relieve his nervous energy.

“I’m not going to ask any questions about all of this because honestly, I don’t want to know the answer. Well, I want to know, but the small part of me that knows self-preservation is screaming at me to just not ask. So instead I will just share some of my feelings, like how I will never be able to forget the sound of a tooth being pulled out of its socket by a pair of slip-joint pliers. Feel free to take a bottle of whisky on your way out, hopefully that will sterilize your wound and keep you numb when whatever you’re on wears off.”

Tony finally got the tracker out of the arm. The man grabbed it from him and tossed in onto the pile of papers along with the tooth tracker. He then walked over to a cabinet that had a hazardous label on it and, after looking through the contents, pulled out a jug of ethanol. He opened the jug and poured the contents out onto the pile of stuff, then started looking around for, presumably, a lighter.

Tony knew that moment would be his only chance. He could run to the panic alarm, but the man would probably kill him before help could arrive. Tony steeled his resolve and bolted for the stairs. He actually made it up the stairs and was about to race towards the door when he was tackled from behind. He hit the ground hard and everything blacked out.

***

Tony woke up to a pounding headache. He tried to open his eyes but quickly shut them again as his head spun. He couldn’t quite remember what happened the night before but given he felt like he was lying on a couch and could hear someone throwing up in the distance, he figured he had spent the night at someone’s house party.

Tony spent a moment trying to collect himself before carefully getting up. Memories from the night before started coming back to him. He stood up and quietly snuck over to the bathroom. The strange man with the metal arm was laying on the floor by the toilet. He looked really bad: his skin was pale and clammy and he was curled up on the floor and shaking like he was in pain. Tony remembered how erratic the man had acted before and figured he must be detoxing off drugs.

Tony determined that his captor didn’t currently pose any threat and left to look around the house. Looking out the window he saw that they were in the middle of a dense forest with a single dirt path leading out. Tony’s Cadillac Deville was outside but when he went out to check, the doors were locked and he didn’t know where the keys were. He went back inside and searched through all the drawers and cabinets in the small house but couldn’t find his keys. However, he did find a first-aid kit and some water bottles in the fridge.

Tony steeled himself and then went back to the bathroom.

“Hey, still alive in here?” Tony said from the doorway.

The man opened his eyes and turned his head to look at Tony.

“Stark?” He asked.

“Um, yeah, I’m Tony Stark. And you are?”

The man slowly sat up. He looked like he was in a lot of pain, and he smelled like sweat and chemicals. His chin and shirt collar were still covered in dried blood and probably other gross bodily fluids. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two slightly crumpled newspaper clippings and handed them to Tony. The first was the clipping from his dad’s workbench, the story and picture of Tony graduating MIT. The second was old and yellowed, and was a picture of the Howling Commandos. Tony’s dad had told him countless stories about the Howling Commandos. Howard was very proud of the weapons he had designed for the team.

Tony had absolutely no idea why this man had taken the two clippings from the lab. All he knew was the man sitting in from of him was clearly suffering and, although Pepper would say Tony didn’t have a compassionate bone in his body, Tony had been through enough hangovers and alcohol detoxes to be able to sympathize with what the man was going through.

“Ok, I know you kidnapped me but there’s obviously a lot going on here, so let’s start with this.”

Tony gave the man that water bottle he had found and he set the first aid kit on the counter to look through it. He found a small bottle of painkillers and looked to see the man had chugged half the water bottle. Tony opened the pill bottle and handed it over to the man. He shook a few pills out onto the sink counter and then pulled a large knife out of his belt. The man used the hilt to crush up the pills and then used the blade to make lines which he then snorted.

“I guess that’s one way to do it,” Tony said while the man closed his eyes again and leaned back against the wall.

“I could get you something a bit stronger if you want. If you give me the car keys I could drive down to the drugstore and be back really fast. I could always hotwire my baby but I like to respect her privacy, you know?”

Tony didn’t have any problem hotwiring his car if it meant escaping, but he wanted to feel out the situation first. He had a feeling that, even incapacitated as he seemed, the man in front of him could have a bullet in the back of Tony’s head in the blink of an eye.

“Aren’t you supposed to be a boy genius or something?” The man asked, his voice hoarse. “You can’t go back now, they’re already after us. All of this is off-script. We have to gather some people and – no – it’s just the two of us. And they took my god damn arm off!” At that he punched the cabinet next to him with the metal arm and put a hole right through it.

Tony froze, feeling his heart pounding, and he tensed his muscles, trying to keep from hyperventilating. After everything that had happened in the past day, this stranger showing aggression was the thing that scared him the most. Tony didn’t let himself think about the reason why.

The man calmed down quickly and then looked up at Tony with big doe-eyes.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t-“ He cut himself off and ran a shaking hand through his hair. This made Tony pause; with the hair out of his face, the man looked eerily familiar. Tony picked up the newspaper clipping from the counter and held the picture of the Howling Commandos up for comparison.

“Hey, are you, like, the secret child of Sargent Barnes or something? Is that why you took this? Well, I guess it would be more like grandkid. But damn if you look similar.”

The man got that creepy thousand-yard-stare on his face Tony was used to seeing in documentaries about soldiers.

“I fell, and I woke up so cold, my arm so cold I thought it was frozen solid. And the Russians found me and I was so relieved. I thought there must be a god, and he sent these soldiers to find me. I thanked god for saving me.” He blinked a few times then pulled keys and a wallet out of his pocket and held them out to Tony.

“There is no god, you need to save yourself.”


End file.
